Mile
Zero

March 19, 2015

I saw a lot of shocked reactions when Nintendo
announced it would be partnering with another company to make smartphone games. The
company was quick to stress that it wouldn't be moving entirely to app stores controlled by
third parties: these games will not be re-releases of existing titles, and Nintendo is still
working on new dedicated console hardware for the next generation. You shouldn't expect
New Super Mario on your phone anytime soon. Basically, their smartphone games will serve as
ads for the "real" games.

Unlike a lot of people, I've never really rooted for Nintendo to become a software-only
company. Other companies that make that jump often do so to their detriment — look at
Sega, which lost a real creative spark when they got out of the hardware business —
and it's even more true for Nintendo, which has always explored the physical aspects of
gaming as much as the virtual. The playful design of the GameCube controller buttons, or the
weirdness of a double-screened handheld, or the runaway popularity of Wii Sports, are
the result of designers who are encouraged to hold strong opinions. A touchscreen, on the
other hand, is a weak opinion — even no opinion, as it imitates (but never really
emulates) physical controls like buttons or joysticks.

But here's the other thing: what Nintendo represents on dedicated handheld hardware, as much
as wacky design chops, is a sustainable market. I play a lot of Android games, I own a
Shield, I'm generally positive on the idea of microconsoles. Even given those facts,
a lot of the games I play on the go are either emulators or console ports, because the app
store model simply does not support development beyond a single mechanic or a few hours of
gameplay. The race to the bottom, and the resulting crash of mobile game prices, means that
you will almost never see a phone game with the kind of lifespan and complexity you'd get
out of even the lamest Nintendo title (Yoshi Touch & Go aside).

I don't think everything Nintendo produces is golden, but they're reliable. People buy
Nintendo games because you're pretty much guaranteed a polished, enjoyable experience, to
the point where they can start with an expanded riff on a gimmick level and still end up with
a solid gameplay hit. They're the Pixar of games. And as a result of that consistency,
people will pay $40 for first-party Nintendo titles, largely sight-unseen. This creates a
virtuous cycle: the revenue from a relatively-expensive gaming market lets them make the
kind of games that justify that cost. It's almost impossible to imagine Nintendo being able
to sustain the same halo in a $1-5 game market.

There's room for both experiences in the gaming ecosystem. Microsoft, Sony, and Steam will
all provide big-budget, adult-oriented games. The app stores are overflowing with shorter,
quirkier, free-to-play fare. Nintendo's niche is that they crossed those lines: oddball
software for all ages that was polished to a mirror sheen. Luckily, even though observers
seem convinced that Nintendo is doomed, the company itself seems well aware of where their
value lies — and it's not on someone else's platform.

September 23, 2014

I have started, and then failed to finish, three posts on the #GamerGate nonsense, in which
a gang of misogynists led by 4Chan have attempted to hound Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn
off the Internet for daring to be women with opinions about video games. There's very little
insightful you can say about this, because they don't have any real arguments for someone to
engage, and also because they're dumb as toast. At some point, however, someone decided that
they'd use "ethics in journalism" as a catchphrase for their trolling.

What they mean by that is anyone's guess. This Vox
explainer does its best to extract an explanation, but other than some noise about
"objectivity," there aren't any concrete demands, and the links to various arguments are
hilariously silly. One claims that there's a difference between "journalist" and "blogger"
based on some vague measure of competence (read: the degree to which you agree with it),
which veterans of the "blogger ethics panel" meme circa 2005 will enjoy. Frankly, the
#GameGate movement's concept of journalism is itself pretty fuzzy, and tough to debate. As a
journalist with actual newsroom experience, I think there are a few things that we should
clear up.

Game journalism, isn't

Real journalists make phone calls. They dig into stories, find other viewpoints, and perform
fact-checking. It's not glamorous work, which may be why reporters are so prone to
self-mythologizing (a tendency I'm not immune to), but it is hard and often tedious. It's
also, in its best moments, confrontational. There's an old saying: journalism is publishing
what someone doesn't want to be published — everything else is just public relations.
Some of that is just more myth-making, but it's also true.

When's the last time you read "gaming news" that had multiple sources? That actively
investigated wrongdoing in the industry? That had something critical to say about more than
how a single game played? You can probably think of exceptions, but that's what they are:
exceptions. The vast majority of what gamers call "journalism" isn't anything like real
reporting.

This isn't unusual, or even wrong. It's pretty typical for trade press, particularly in the
entertainment industry. After all, there's only so combatative you can be when you're
dependent on cooperation with game studios and publishers in order to have anything to write
about. I don't expect hard-hitting investigations from Bass Player or
The A.V. Club either. It's not journalism, but it still has value.

#GamerGate doesn't understand the difference

Unfortunately, as far as anyone can tell, the cries of "ethics in journalism" actually
translate to a desire for more press releases and PR, like in the halcyon days of
Nintendo Power. That's probably comforting for a lot of people, because PR is
inherently more comforting than critical thought, but it means what they want and what they
claim they want are very different things.

There's a kind of irony of calling for "objectivity" in gaming press, where the dominant
mode of writing is through previews and reviews. People making this call aren't asking for
actual objectivity, because that wouldn't make sense — what's an "objective" review?
One that can definitively state that yes, the game exists? It's a code word for "tell me
about the graphics, and the genre, and leave any pesky context out of it."

That isn't much of a review, frankly. It's the kind of thinking that gives four stars to
Triumph of the Will because the cinematography is groundbreaking, no matter what the
content might have been. Incidentally, the author of the definitive — if satirical
— Objective Game Reviews site has a really
nice post about this.

We have met the enemy, and he is us

Here's what's funny about #GamerGate and its muddled, incoherent demands for journalism: by
all accounts, the person who actually meets a lot of their criteria is none other than Anita
Sarkeesian, the person they loathe the most. I mean, think about it:

About half of her videos are just unaltered clips from games — that's what makes
them so powerful, since they speak for themselves. And what's more objective than plain
footage?

She states her biases right out of the gate. The YouTube channel is called "Feminist
Frequency," so people know what they're getting into.

She's funded by people who paid for her kickstarter, not gaming companies or PR firms.
There's no corporate influence.

It's exactly what they're asking for! And they hate it! It's almost as though, protests to
the contrary, this isn't about journalism at all. As if there's actually an agenda
being pushed that's more about forcing women and alternative viewpoints out. Imagine that.

May 8, 2014

I've owned an Nvidia Shield for a little
under a year now. The situation hasn't entirely changed: I use it most often as a
portable emulator, and it's wonderful for that. I beat Mother 3, Drill Dozer,
and Super Metroid a while back, and I'm working my way through Final Fantasy 6
now.

But there are more Android games that natively support physical controls now, especially as
the Ouya and add-on joysticks have raised the profile for Android gaming. It's not a huge
library, but between Humble Bundles and what's in the Google Play store, I certainly don't
feel cheated. If you're thinking about picking one up, here's what's good (and what's merely
playable) so far.

Aquaria may be the best value for the dollar on Shield, which makes it weird that
apparently you can't buy it for Android anymore. A huge, sprawling Metroid-alike set
underwater, with a beautifully-painted art style, it's the first game that I played where
the Shield's controls not only worked, they worked really well (which figures, since it was
developed for XBox controls alongside mouse and touch). If you managed to nab this in an old
Humble Bundle, it's well worth the installation.

Actually the third in a series of "tower offense" games, where you send a small group of
tanks through a path filled with obstacles, Anomaly 2 is one of the weird cases where
the physical controls work, and are very well-tuned, but you still kind of wish the game was
on a touchscreen. Playing the earlier Anomaly titles on a phone, you'd get into a groove of
tapping icons to balance your resources, targeting, and path. It had a nice Google Maps
fluidity to it, and that kind of speed suffers a little bit when panning around via
thumbstick. It's still worth a look, but probably better played on a touch device.

In contrast, Badlands seems like a poor match for the Shield--it's a single-press
game similar to any number of other smartphone titles (Flappy Bird, Tiny
Wings, etc). But there's one distinguishing factor, which is that the triggers on the
Shield (which are mapped to the "flap" action) are fully analog, so the harder you pull the
faster the onscreen character flies. It's a small change, but it completely alters the feel
of the game for the better. The layered, 2D art style is also gorgeous, and the sound design
is beautiful, but on the other hand I actually have no idea what's going on, or why some
little black blobby creature is trying to travel from left to right.

Most of these games come from the Humble Bundles, which are almost always worth throwing $5
at, but I actually bought Clarc from the Google Play store. It plays a bit like
Sokoban, mixed with Portal 2's laser puzzles and Catherine's block/enemy
entrapment. Previously released on Ouya, the controls are still solid on the Shield, and the
puzzles follow a nice pattern of seeming impossible, then seeming obvious once they're
worked out. A super-fast checkpoint system also helps. It's cute, funny, and good for about
6 hours of serious play.

I'm in favor of anything that puts Crazy Taxi on every platform in existence, but
only if it's coded well. The problem is that while this port supports the gamepad, it's
hamstrung by the adaptations made for phones — namely, the Crazy Drift can't be
triggered manually, and the Crazy Dash feels sluggish. In a game where you need to be
drifting or dashing almost all the time, this pretty much ruins your ability to run the map.
I'd say to skip this unless it's on sale.

Gunman Clive was originally released on the PS Vita, and it shows: a cel-shaded
platformer with a strong Contra influence, this is another bite-sized chunk of
gameplay. It does seem to be missing some of the bonus features from the original release,
but there's still plenty of variety (and some huge, fun bosses) to fight. Considering that
it's only a couple of bucks, it's well worth the price if you're in the mood for some
neo-retro shooting.

Speaking of retro, one of my favorite discoveries is the games that Orange Pixel has been
tossing out for all kinds of platforms, particularly Gunslugs and Heroes of
Loot. Both are procedurally-generated takes on classic games (Metal Slug and
Gauntlet respectively) with a pixel-art design and a goofy sense of humor. The
rogue-like randomization of the levels makes both of them compulsively playable, too.
They're great time-wasters.

One of Gameloft's derivative mobile clones, NOVA 3 is trying very hard to either be
Crysis or Halo. It doesn't really matter which since the result is just boring
man-in-suit shooting, with sloppy, ill-configured thumbstick controls. All that, and it's
still one of the more expensive titles in this list. Definitely skip this one.

Rochard was released on Steam a while back, and then re-released just for Shield this
spring. It's a clever little puzzle-platformer that's based around a Half-Life
gravity gun, but also some light combat. It would probably be better without the latter: the
AI is generally terrible, and the weapons aren't inspiring. At its best, Rochard has
you toggling low-gravity jumps, stacking crates, and juggling power cells to disable force
fields, and those are the parts that make it worth playing.

Finally, fans of shooters have plenty of options (including remakes of R-Types I and
II), but there's something to be said for time-travel epic Sine Mora. Although it
makes no sense whatsoever, it's a great bullet-hell shmup with a strong emphasis on
replayability through different ships and abilities, score attack modes, and boss fights. I
love a good shooter, even if I'm terrible at them, and this is no exception.

What's missing from the games on Shield so far? I'd like to see more tactical options, a la
Advance Wars or XCOM (which has a port, but doesn't understand gamepads). I'd
appreciate a good RPG. And I'd love to see a real, serious shooter that's not a tossed-off
Wolfenstein demake. But it's worth also understanding why these games don't exist:
the economics of the mobile market don't support them. When your software sells for $5 a
pop, maximum, you can't afford to do a lot of content development or design.

The result, except for ports from more sustainable platforms, is a bunch of quick hits
instead of real investments. Almost all the games above, the ones that are worth playing at
least, were either released on PC/console first, or simultaneously. The good news is that
tools like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 promote simultaneous mobile/PC development. The bad
news is that getting better games for mobile may mean cheapening development on the big
platforms. If you thought that consoles were ruining PC game design before, wait until
phones start to make an impact.

January 16, 2014

At the Consumer Electronics Show, Sony showed off the fruits of their acquisition of Gaikai,
a company that streams video games over the Internet. This is something with which I have a
little experience: in 2012, I worked for Big Fish on the now-discontinued Big Fish
Unlimited, which did the same thing but for casual games. I was pretty sure that it was
doomed then, and I'm pretty sure that similar platforms — including Sony's Playstation
Now and OnLive — are doomed now, and for the forseeable future. The reason is simple:
streaming just doesn't scale.

Let's say you're playing a game by streaming it to yourself from another computer you own,
as in Nvidia's Shield or Valve's SteamOS. To do this you need two boxes: one to actually run
the game, and one to act as a thin client, providing the display and input support. There
are lots of things that can cause problems here — network connectivity, slow hardware,
latency — but at the very least you're always going to have enough hardware to run the
game, because you own both ends of it. Streaming scales in a linear fashion.

Now pretend you're doing the same thing, but instead of running the host machine yourself,
it lives in a remote datacenter. For each person who's playing, the streaming service needs
another computer to run the game — the scaling is still linear. You can't cache a game
on a cheap edge node like you can a regular file, because it's an interactive program. And
there's no benefit to running all those games simultaneously, the way that Google can
leverage millions of GMail customers to lower e-mail transmission costs and spam processing
algorithms cheaper. No, you're stuck with a simple equation: n players = n
servers. And those servers are not cheap: they need hefty graphics cards, local storage,
cooling systems, sound cards, etc.

And it gets worse, because those players are not going to obligingly spread their playtime
around the clock to keep the load constant. No, they're going to pile in every evening in
much higher numbers — much higher — than any other time of the day.
League of Legends, a single (albeit very popular) game has had more than 5 million
concurrent players. During peak hours, streaming providers will struggle to run enough host
boxes. During off hours, all that expensive hardware just sits idle, completely unused.

At first, these problems seem solvable. When you don't have a lot of customers, it's not
that bad to add new hosts to compensate for growth. Those earlier players may be more
forgiving of wait times, attributing them to growing pains. But consider the endgame: if
something like Playstation Now achieves real, widespread success (despite all the other
network latency and quality of service issues these services always face), Sony's ultimate
scenario is having literally millions of rack-mounted PS4s in datacenters around the
country, many of them running at peak capacity for hours on end. That's more servers than
Google, Microsoft, and Facebook put together.

At Big Fish, the business argument was that casual games could be run with multiple
applications to a machine, so the scaling pressure was lower. But it's still linear: you've
lowered the total number of machines you might need in the long run, but there's still a
direct relationship between that number and your number of players. The only way to scale
online gaming gracefully is to either find a way that games can share state (i.e., MMOs), or
offload more of it to the client. As a front-end JavaScript specialist, I always thought Big
Fish would have better luck porting its games to the browser instead of streaming them to a
Java applet.

But there's only so much you can move to the client when your selling point is "next-gen
games without next-gen hardware." In the case of Sony and OnLive, no amount of browser
wizardry or Playstation branding is going to solve that fundamental scaling problem. It may
be workable for instant demos, or beta previews. But for mainstream gaming, without a
miraculous breakthrough in the way games are built and executed, the math just isn't there.

December 10, 2013

Even if I'm sticking with Steam for most of my gaming, our new PS4 did get me interested in
Warframe, the free-to-play shooter that's available
on Playstation and PC. I don't normally care for free-to-play, if only because I feel guilty
for never buying anything, but I liked the central conceit of Warframe:
procedurally-generated levels and highly-mobile Mass Effect-style combat. In
retrospect, I probably should have been more skeptical. To understand why, we have to look
back at how shooters have been built over the last twenty years.

There was a time, way before Halo and before franchises like Battlefield ran
the earth, when one of the main selling points of a first-person shooter was the quantity of
unique weapons that it brought to the table--an actual arms race, peaking with Duke3D
which (for all its flaws) had some clever joke guns to go with the ubiquitous
pistol/shotgun/chaingun trio. I'm not saying this was a better time, or that they were
better games, but there was definitely a sense that the genre was about creative
destruction, in the same way that fighting games are about combo systems and special
attacks.

Then id Software built a monster for competitive deathmatch: Quake and its successors
had an incredibly bland set of weapons, because in "serious" multiplayer the goal is to
streamline everything except moving and shooting. This was the second refinement of shooter
design, and it focused on the levels themselves, but as topology instead of as setting.
Players concentrated on learning the levels so that they could plot a path that would keep
them supplied, while denying pickups to the other players. A good Quake or Unreal
Tournament player knew the game's weapons and how to aim, but more importantly they knew
where to go, and when. Navigation became the mark of quality for a deathmatch bot.

Since then, these tendencies have mellowed as the possibility of more complex interactions
and narratives has become available. Environments are built more for realism and story,
weapons are more traditional and not usually why you buy the game. Which brings us to
Warframe, which has basically none of these things. There's hardly any story, the
"levels" are randomly generated from a series of tilesets, and the weapons are part of the
free-to-play grind: either buy a new gun with real money, or spend a lot of time crafting
one within the game's economy. Unlike the Mass Effect and Gears of War titles
it resembles, there's no explicit cover system, but players do have a much wider range of
movement options than a typical shooter: there are slides, flips, and wall runs available
through various key combos.

If Warframe's computer-generated levels were any good, this would be a different
post. Good levels would give players a way to put their acrobatic movement skills to good
use, rewarding people who have learned the parkour system and can improvise in response to
new environments. But the random generator mostly builds long, boring hallways connecting
wide-open, pre-designed rooms, none of which require any particular skill outside of
strafing and taking cover behind walls. Since players can't learn the levels and their flow,
they can't optimize or get better at moving through them. And since new weapons require an
investment of serious cash or time, almost everyone's using the same rifle and the same
melee weapon, which means you never see anything that makes you want to spend any money or
time in the first place.

The irony of this problem is that someone already got the formula right for doing procedural
FPS games, and they did it by almost exactly reversing Warframe's formula.
Borderlands has hand-built levels and enemy placement, combined with randomized
weapon generation: each gun consists of components assembled onto a set of base bodies,
which vary by "manufacturer" with certain preset tendencies and aesthetics. For example,
Mariwan guns always inflict status effects (poison, fire, etc), while Jacobs weapons are
Western-themed and can often fire as fast as the player can mash the button. Within those
simple parameters, however, the results when you pull the trigger can vary wildly.

The result is a game that combines the two old-school driving forces of FPS design —
clever level design and weapon variety — with the collector's urge that powers massive
multiplayer games (Borderlands even borrows the color-coded quality markings from
World of Warcraft, making it easy to evaluate a weapon drop in an instant). The
innovation is not proceduralism — games like Diablo have long offered that
— but figuring out how to balance it with the formula for a replayable and
rewarding shooter. As someone who almost totally lacks a collection instinct, but loves the
classic FPS genre, Borderlands 2 hits the sweet spot with remarkably few missteps
(it's also surprisingly smart and funny, which is a welcome change).

I don't think procedural generation is impossible for first-person games — indeed, I
think it's likely to have a bright future, particularly as web games mature and optimize for
delivery size — but it illustrates just how difficult the challenge is likely to be
for anyone who attempts it. For all that people talk about the genre as if it's just a
collection of bro-heavy manshooters, there is undeniably a huge amount of craft that goes
into the fundamental mechanics. As Kevin Cloud notes in Dan Pinchbeck's analysis of
Doom (now 20 years old!),

Every genre has its real strengths, but in a shooter... if running and shooting is not fun,
doesn’t feel natural, doesn’t feel visceral and powerful, then I think you are going to lose
out.

Movement in FPS games is not just about how the player transitions from point A to point B,
but about all the obstacles and decisions that make up that route. As such, building
procedural content is not impossible, but it needs to provide good options for cover, paths
for moving between pickups, and unexpected chances to either ambush enemies or be ambushed.
Warframe may do this one day, but right now it's failing miserably. In the process,
it's showing how little the developers have really thought about how the game they're
building fits into the traditions of its genre.

December 4, 2013

Belle and I were planning on getting a Roku to replace our five-year-old XBox this
Christmas, since the games are drying up and it doesn't make any sense to pay for a Live
subscription just to watch Netflix and HBO. I still kind of bear a grudge against Sony for
the CD rootkit they passed around years ago, but then my employers at ArenaNet bought
everyone a PS4 as a holiday bonus. I am, it turns out, not above being a hypocrite when it
comes to free stuff.

You can explain a lot about the last three generations of consoles by remembering that, at
heart, Microsoft is a software company and Sony is a hardware company. Why did the XBox 360
suffer regular heat failures? Why does the PS Vita interface look like an After Dark
screensaver? Our 360 was clearly on the edge of another DVD failure, so I bear them no
particular good will. But you have to admit: up to the point that a given XBox malfunctions
in one way or another, Microsoft knows how to build a usable operating system. Sony... well,
it's not so much a core skill of theirs.

For example, after you turn on the PS4, and after the hundreds of megabytes of updates are
done downloading and installing themselves a few times, you're greeted with a row of boxes:

Some kind of activity stream box, because people really wanted another Facebook.

Every game you've ever played. In my case, one demo I tried and will never touch again.

A web browser, which for some inconceivable reason doesn't use the touchpad on the
controller, but has to be controlled via the thumbsticks and triggers, like Capcom wrote a
game called Devil May Surf.

An ad for Sony's video service, which nobody is going to use instead of Netflix, and
which can't be removed.

An ad for Sony's music service, which nobody is going to use instead of
anything, and which can't be removed.

Something called the Playroom, which is useless if you don't have the PS4 camera, but
can't be removed (there is a theme here).

A single item that contains all of your video streaming applications, even though these
are probably where most people spend at least 50% of their time these days.

Oh, and of course, an item marked "Library" that shows a subset of the same list, I
guess in case you want to see them arranged in vertical rows instead of horizontally.

At least the list is in chronological order by use, but only for certain items: no matter
how often I open Amazon's video app, it'll always be cordoned off in a submenu, alongside a
bunch of other video providers that I haven't actually installed but which Sony really wants
me to know about, like Vudu and Crackle.

Apparently I'm a little grumpy about the menus.

Anyway for us, this is a media player, which means we'd like to have a remote control, but
those don't exist for PS4 yet and it can't use regular IR remotes. The controller layout may
make sense to someone who owned a PS3, but it's just baffling to me: why is the button
normally used to go backwards assigned here to play/pause duties? To be fair, the XBox never
really had a great controller story for DVDs either (both of them put fast-forward on the
triggers, where you're guaranteed to accidentally hit it while setting the controller down),
but at least it tried to be consistent with the rest of the OS.

You can pair a smartphone with the PS4, which one would think could be a chance to show
custom controls for media, what with the touchscreen and all. You'd be wrong: the PS4 app
dedicates 90% of its surface to a swipeable touchpad, apparently on the assumption that the
three directional inputs on the actual controller are insufficient.

The whole time you're watching a movie, of course, the controller will glow like some sort
of demented blue firefly, which helps the camera (which I don't have) to see where I am
(hint: the couch). Since you can't just turn off the LED, I've got the whole controller set
to shut itself off after ten minutes. This solves the glow, and keeps the batteries from
draining themselves at an alarming rate, but now when I want to actually use the controller
for something — say, to pause the movie because our dog has started making that
special "I'm going to throw up" face — it interrupts with a bright blue screen, every
single time, to ask me who I am. Meanwhile, my movie keeps playing in the background.

This is worth some emphasis: on the XBox, a console where we actually had multiple accounts,
each new controller that was activated would either log in as the current user or just kind
of wait in "guest" mode until the player actually signed in. On the PS4, a console where we
have one account, to which I was already signed in with our only controller 20
minutes ago, Sony needs to know my identity before I can perform the critical,
account-bound task of pausing a movie. Meanwhile, the dog is now standing sheepishly in
front of a vomit-stained rug.

I'm a little grumpy about the media functions, too.

I'm well aware it's a little ridiculous to gripe this much about a free game system.
It's not that the PS4 is a bad machine — it's on par with your average DVD player in
terms of usability — but I tend to feel like maybe they should aim a little higher.
I'm really hoping that these kinds of fixes will be easy to update, since most of the UI is
apparently built using web
technology instead of painstakingly coded native widgets.

What's really interesting about comparing consoles from both companies is that the kinds of
things I really miss from the XBox (pinned items, Kinect voice commands, good media apps)
weren't there from the start. Microsoft has gone through at least three major revisions
since they released the 360 in 2005. Even though there have been regressions (and the ads
have certainly gotten bigger over time), the overall trend has been for the better —
in part because they've been effectively allowed to throw the whole thing away and start
over. As far as I can tell, the PS3 was also improved, even if it wasn't reinvented in the
same way. It takes a lot of nerve to make sweeping changes like that, and as well as a
conviction that the physical box is not what you're selling — a philosophy that's
well-suited to Microsoft's software background, but that even hardware companies can no
longer ignore.

I've been so embedded in a constantly-shifting web environment for so long that I sometimes
forget that not everything updates on a monthly basis. Sony will be more conservative than
Microsoft, but even they will be rolling out patches to the PS4, many of which will probably
address my complaints. We live in a world where you can turn around and find that your DVD
player, or your phone, or your browser suddenly looks and acts completely differently.
That's great for people like me who thrive on novelty, but it now occurs to me just how
disorienting this might be for ordinary people. It may be worth considering whether a little
stability might be good for us — even if it means preserving the bad with the good
— and whether the technical community might benefit from a little sympathy to users
overwhelmed by our love of change.

September 18, 2013

There's a fine line between nonchalance and disregard for the player, and I'm not sure that
Aquaria doesn't cross over it. As one of the best games on the Shield right now, I've
been playing a lot of it — or, rather, alternating between playing it and looking up
clues online. In a way, I respect the sheer amount of content the developers have put
together, and the confidence they have in players to discover it, but I could use a little
more signposting and, to be honest, a bit more challenge.

For example, the middle section of Aquaria is mostly non-linear: certain areas are
locked away until you've beaten a few bosses and taken their abilities, but the order is
still mostly flexible. Although it sounds great in theory, in practice this just means
you're repeatedly lost and without a real goal. Having enormous maps just makes exacerbates
the problem, because it means you'll wander one way across the world only to find out that
you're not quite ready yet and need to hunt down another boss somewhere —
probably all the way at the other end.

I'm goal-oriented in games, so this kind of ambiguity has always bugged me. The
Castlevania titles post-Symphony of the Night suffer from this to some extent,
but they usually offered something to do during the trip that made it feel
productive--levelling up your character, or offering random weapon drops. Aquaria has
a limited cooking system, but it's only really necessary in boss fights and it rarely does
anything besides offer healing and specific boosts, so it's not very compelling.

According to an
interview with the developers, Aquaria was originally controlled with keyboard
and mouse, and they eventually moved it to mouse-only (which came in handy when it was
ported to touch devices). Every now and then the original design peeks through, like when
certain enemies fire projectiles in a bullet-hell shooter pattern. The Shield's twin-stick
controls make this really easy (and fun) to dodge, but since the game was intended for
touch, these enemies are relatively rare, and the lengthy travel through the game tends
toward the monotonous.

Look, I get that we have entered a brave new world of touch-based control schemes. For the
most part, I am in favor of that — I'm always happy to see innovation and
experimentation. But playing Aquaria on the Shield makes it clear that there's a lot
of tension between physical and touch controls, and it's easy to lose something in the
transition from the former to the latter. Aquaria designed around a gamepad (and an
un-obstructed screen) could be a much more interesting game. Yes, it would be harder and
less accessible — but the existing game leaves us with "easy and tedious," which is
arguably a worse crime.

I'm starting to think that in our rush to embrace casual, touch experiences (in no small
part because of the rise of touch-only devices), we may be making assumptions about the
audience that aren't true — such as the idea that it's the buttons themselves that
were scary — and it's not always a net positive for game design. At its heart,
Aquaria is a "core" game, not a casual game: it's just too big, and the bosses are
too rough, for this to be in the same genre as Angry Birds or whatever. Compare this
to Cave Story (its obvious inspiration), a game that was free to cram a ridiculous
amount of non-linear content into its setting because its traditional platforming gameploy
was so solid.

There is a disturbing tendency for many people to insist that there must be a winner and a
loser in any choice. In the last two weeks, every tech site on the planet decided that the
loser was Nintendo: why don't they just close up shop and make iPhone games? I think it's a
silly idea — anyone measuring Nintendo's success now against their performance with
the Wii is grading them on the wrong end of a ridiculous curve — and Aquaria
only makes me feel stronger about that. For all that smartphone gaming brings us, there are
some experiences that are just going to be better with buttons and real gaming hardware. As
long as that's the case, consoles are in no danger of extinction.

August 30, 2013

Let's say that you're making a new game console, and you're not one of the big three (Sony,
Microsoft, and Nintendo). You can't afford to take time for developers to get up to speed,
because you're already at a mindshare deficit. So you pick a commodity middleware that runs
on a lot of hardware, preferably one that already has lots of software and a decent SDK.
These days that means using Android, which is why most of the new microconsoles (Ouya, Gamestick, Mojo)
are just running re-skinned versions of Android 4.x.

Nvidia's Shield is no different in terms of the underlying OS, but it does change the form
factor compared to the other Android microconsoles. Instead of a set-top box or HDMI stick,
it effectively crams the company's ridiculously powerful Tegra 4 chipset into an XBox
controller, and then bolts on an LCD screen. I like Android, I like buttons, and I spend a
lot of time bored on a bus during my commute, so I bought one late last week.

It's a bulky chunk of plastic, for sure. I don't particularly want to try throwing both it
and the Chromebook into the same small Timbuktu bag. But in the hand it feels almost exactly
like an XBox 360 controller — meaning it's very comfortable, and not at all
cumbersome. It's definitely the best package I've ever used for emulators: playing GBA games
feels pretty much like the real thing, except with a much larger, prettier screen. I'd have
bought it just for emulation, which is well-supported on Android these days.

Actual Android games are kind of a mixed bag. I own a fair number of them, between the
occassional Play Store purchase and all the Humble Bundles, and most of them aren't designed
for gamepad controls. The Shield does have a touchscreen (as well as the ability to use the
right thumbstick as a mouse cursor), but the way it's set up doesn't promote touch-only
gaming: there's no good way to hold the screen while the body of the controller sits in the
way, and portrait mode is even more awkward.

But if the developer has added gamepad support, the experience is really, really good. I've
been playing Asphalt
8, Aquaria, and No
Gravity lately, and feeling pretty satisfied. For a lot of games, particularly
traditional genres like racing or shooters that require multiple simultaneous inputs, you
just can't beat having joysticks and physical buttons. It also helps showcase the kinds of
graphics that phones/tablets can pump out if your thumbs aren't always blocking the screen.

So the overall software situation looks a little lopsided: lots of great emulators, but only
a few native titles that really take advantage of the hardware. I'm okay with this, and I
actually expect it to get better. Since almost all the new microconsoles are Android-based,
and almost all of them use gamepads (for which there's a standard API), it's only going to
be natural for developers to add controller support to their games. I think the real
question is going to be whether Android (or any mobile OS) can support the kinds of lengthy,
high-quality titles that have been the standard on traditional, $40/game consoles.

If Android manages to become a home for decent "core" games, it'll probably be due to what
Chris Pruett, a game developer and former Android team member, calls
out in this interview: the implicit creation of a "standardized" console platform.
Instead of developers needing to learn completely new systems with every console generation,
they can write for a PC-like operating system across many devices (cue "fragmentation"
panics). Systems like the Shield, which push the envelope for portable graphics, are going
to play a serious role in that transition, whether or not the device is successful in and of
itself.

The other interesting question if microconsoles take off will be whether there's a driver
for innovation there. In the full-sized console space, it's been relatively easy for the big
three companies to throw out crazy ideas from time to time, ranging from Kinect and Eyetoy
to pretty much everything Nintendo's done for the last decade. PCs have been much slower to
change, a fact that has frustrated
some designers. Are microconsoles more like desktop computers, in that they have a standard
OS and commodity hardware? Or are they more like regular consoles, since they're cheap
enough to make crazy gambles affordable?

The Shield, perhaps unsurprisingly from Nvidia, points to the former. It's an unabashedly
traditional console experience, from the emphasis on graphics to the eight-button
controller. It's good at playing the kind of games that you'd find on a set-top box (or
indeed, emulating those boxes themselves), but it's probably not the next Wii: you're buying
iteration, not innovation--technologically, at least. It just so happens that after a couple
of years of trying to play games with only a touchscreen, sometimes that's exactly what I
want.

May 2, 2013

There's a common complaint about the Bioshock games, which is that they're not very
good shooters. People writing about Bioshock Infinite tend to mention this, saying
that the story is interesting and the writing is sharp but the actual game is poor. And this
is true: it's not a very good first-person shooter, and it's arguably much worse than its
predecessors. But this implication of most of these comments, from Kotaku's
essay on its violence to Brainy Gamer's naming it the "apotheosis of
FPS, is that Infinite is bad in many ways because it's a first-person
shooter--that it's shackled to its point of view. In doing so, it has become a sort of
stand-in for the whole genre, from Call of Duty to Halo.

I sympathize with the people who feel like the game's violence is incoherent (it is), and
who are sick of the whole console-inspired manshooting genre. But I love shooters, and it
bugs me a little to see them saddled with the burden of everything that's wrong with
American media.

Set aside Infinite's themes and its apparent belief that the best superpower is the
ability to literally generate plot holes--when we say that it's not a good FPS, what does
that means? What is it, mechanically, that separates the two? I'm not a designer, but as a
avid FPS player, there are basically three rules that Infinite breaks.

First of all, the enemy progression can't be just about "bigger lifebars." A good shooter
increases difficulty by forcing players to change their patterns because they're not able to
rely on the same rote strategy. Halo, for all its flaws, gets this right: few of its
enemies are actually "tough," but each of them has a different method of avoiding damage,
and a different weapon style. By throwing in different combinations, players are forced to
change up their tactics for each encounter, or even at multiple points during the encounter.
Almost all of Infinite's enemies, on the other hand, are the same walking tanks, with
similar (dim-witted) behaviors and hitscan weaponry. I never had to change my approach, only
the amount of ammo I used.

Along those lines, weapons need strengths and weaknesses. Each one should have a situation
where they feel thrillingly powerful, as well as a larger set of situations where they're
relatively useless. This doesn't have to conflict with a limited inventory--I loved
Crysis 2's sniper rifle, spending the entire game sneaking between cover positions in
stealth mode, but it was always paired with a strong close-in gun for when I was overrun. A
good game forces you to change weapons for reasons other than "out of ammunition."
Infinite's close-range weapons feel identical, and its sniper rifle is rarely useful,
since a single shot alerts everyone to your position.

Finally, every fight cannot simply be about shooting. Most shooters are actually about
navigating space and territory, and the shooting becomes a way of altering the priorities
for movement. Do you take cover, or dodge in the open? Do you need more range, or need to
close on an enemy? The original Bioshock made the interplay between the environment
and your abilities one of its most compelling features: electrifying pools of water, setting
fire to flammable objects, flinging scenery around with telekinesis. But at the very least,
you need an objective from time to time with more complexity than "kill everything," both as
a player and in terms of narrative.

Bioshock Infinite has, in all seriousness, no period I can remember when my objective
was not reduced to "kill everything." Combined with a bland arsenal and blander enemies,
this makes it a tedious game, but it also puts it at complete odds with its characters. The
writing in Infinite is unusually good for a shooter, but it's hard not to notice that
Elizabeth freaks out (rightfully) during one of Booker's murderous rampages, comes to a
cheery acceptance with it a few minutes later, and then spends the rest of the game tossing
helpful items to you under fire. That's writing that makes both the narrative and the
mechanics worse, by drawing attention to the worst parts of both.

It's not the only shooter with those flaws--people just had higher expectations for it. The
average FPS is badly written, and it's a favorite genre for warmongering propaganda pieces.
But that's true of many games, and yet we don't see pieces talking about the "apotheosis of
platformers," or talking about RTS as though they're emblematic of wider ills just because
Starcraft II is kind of a mess. And there's still interesting stuff being done in the
genre: Portal and Thirty Flights of Loving come to mind. To say that FPS have
reached their limits, ironically, seems like a pretty limited perspective.

January 3, 2013

During one of those 24-hour colds, when I curl up under every blanket in the house and just
wait for the fever to break, I often lose track of reality. It's not like I hallucinate.
But, drifting in and out of consciousness with my body temperature far above normal, the
line blurs between dreaming and my rational mind, which means I find myself thinking quite
seriously about things that are either entirely absurd, or which never actually happened.
It's the closest I get to doing drugs.

It may just be that I was playing it after recovering from a cold during the holidays, but
Hotline Miami often feels like it comes from a similar place (fever or drugs, take
your pick). Although it pays homage to Drive with its setting, violence, and a
selection of trippy electronic dance tunes, Hotline adds a gloss of unreality: heavy
filtering (including a subtle screen tilt), an increasingly unreliable narrator, and an
astonishing sound design. The darker half of the soundtrack leans heavily on synth drones,
distorted bass, and indistinct vocal echoes, walking a line precisely between captivating
and terrifying.

So it is atmospheric. But in the wake of Newtown it is difficult to talk about Hotline
Miami without talking about violence, since it is also a game about brutal, sickening
violence. Dressed up in a retro 16-bit facade, the blood and gore is made more abstract, and
thus more palatable, but that's a bit of a cheat, isn't it? The NRA recently blamed video
games for school shootings, drawing on such contemporary examples as Mortal Kombat
and Natural Born Killers, and while that's obviously laughable (and more than a
little disgusting) it's hard to take the moral high ground when a prospective game of the
year for many people involves beating anonymous mobsters to death with a crowbar.

Part of the problem is that Hotline Miami is and isn't about those things. Someone
playing the game isn't sitting at a computer plotting murder--they're primarily thinking
about navigating space, line of sight, and the AI's predictable response. Most violent video
games are only superficially violent: mechanically they're just button presses and spatial
awareness. That's not an excuse, but it does explain why gamers get so huffy about the
accusations of immorality. It also begs the question: if these games aren't actually about
death and destruction, then why all the trappings?

In the case of Hotline Miami, there's a studied juvenile quality to the whole affair.
It's the interactive version of some smart-but-disengaged stoner's doodling on their high
school chemistry notebook. It's gross because its influences are gross, and because gross
things are fun to draw, and because chemistry is boring, dude. This accounts for some
of the feverishness as well, since it taps into the same powerful imaginative impulse that
we have as kids and mostly lose when we have to start paying our own rent.

It's not a bad thing for Hotline Miami to draw on those influences, or for it to be
ultra-violent. There's a place for ugly, childish things in our cultural stew: I don't think
you get Death Proof without Saw or Dead Alive. I like the game. But it
bothers me a little that its violence is so unremarkable, and that it wants to use
self-awareness as an excuse or an explanation. Using excess to criticize gaming culture was
old with Splatterhouse (another up-to-the-minute reference from the NRA, there). So
since we don't have a lot of variety in video game narratives, maybe we should stop letting
"bloodthirsty" pass for "profound."